Yeah, that's about what I expected. And the Forgotten Realms, which Baldur's Gate takes place in, is decades old and built on these same racist foundations. And a lot of it gets unquestioned. Goblins are still ontologically evil in the game and it's always OK to kill them, and the concept of "surrender" does not exist. The Orientalist shit is all canon to the world, but they're loathe to retcon it so instead they just ignore it. Meanwhile D&D as a system took forever to realize that maybe races shouldn't be evil by their very nature but then they proceed to create fantasy British people enslaving monkey people in the year of Juche 111.
Yeah, that's about what I expected. And the Forgotten Realms, which Baldur's Gate takes place in, is decades old and built on these same racist foundations. And a lot of it gets unquestioned. Goblins are still ontologically evil in the game and it's always OK to kill them, and the concept of "surrender" does not exist. The Orientalist shit is all canon to the world, but they're loathe to retcon it so instead they just ignore it. Meanwhile D&D as a system took forever to realize that maybe races shouldn't be evil by their very nature but then they proceed to create fantasy British people enslaving monkey people in the year of Juche 111.
I haven't really been following DND releases in recent years, what's this referring to?
One of the 5e Spelljammer books IIRC. This article goes over it pretty well.
Damn, pretty crazy that they went backwards with the Hazodee lore, especially considering how old the original Spelljammer is.